The Nature of God’s Being

Thomas D. Keith

“I n the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful; Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds; The Most Gracious, the Most Merciful; Master of the Day of Judgment; It is You we worship, and upon You we call for help.” 1 These are the opening lines of the Qur’an. Here, in one of the great sacred texts of the monotheistic tradition, we find a theme that is central to Islam, Judaism, and Christianity alike: the nature of God. As humans, we use and understand the concepts of mercy and graciousness through the lens of a finite and contingent existence, yet as theists we predicate them of an infinite and necessary God. Are we justified in doing this? And if so, how?

In the medieval era, philosophers addressed these questions by focusing on the nature of being. By first understanding how God relates to our finite and contingent understanding of existence itself, we can discover how God relates to our creaturely understanding of His other attributes. The objective for these philosophers was simple: meaningfully describe an immanent God without losing His transcendence. To achieve this, medieval philosophers developed three different categories of theories as to the nature of God’s being: the doctrines of equivocity, analogy, and univocity. Do any of these theories succeed? This paper will argue that the version of the doctrine of analogy formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas succeeds in preserving both God’s transcendence and His immanence.

1. Qur’an 1:1-5 (ClearQuran Translation).

In doing so, this paper will first explain the background of the debate and explore its history. We will find that the doctrine of equivocity, particularly as formulated by Rabbi Moses Maimonides, severely undermines the personal and immanent nature of God. Then, we will look at Aquinas’s alternative: the doctrine of analogy. We will find that his near-pedantic distinctions between different kinds of analogy allow him to argue for his position without falling into the same traps of his predecessors. We will then evaluate the arguments of John Duns Scotus. He believed that Aquinas’s position logically devolves into equivocity, and that the only way to meaningfully predicate terms of God is to accept a doctrine of univocity. We will find that Aquinas’s position does not, in fact, devolve into a doctrine of equivocity. Furthermore, we will find that Scotus’s doctrine of univocity does not provide Christian orthodoxy with an acceptable alternative.

How is it possible for mere humans to predicate terms of God? On one hand, the Bible makes references to characteristics that are true of God: His holiness, His justice, His wisdom. In predicating these terms of God, the authors of sacred texts assume that these concepts can describe God in meaningful ways. However, whenever we use these terms colloquially, we are referring to concepts that are derived from our experience as created beings. These concepts are therefore contingent and finite. It seems difficult, therefore, to justify predicating them of a transcendent God because it forces us to bring God under creaturely concepts. In other words, it appears as if we are reducing Him to human terms. We might avoid this problem by taking the alternative, and say that these terms, when applied to God, are wholly unlike our creaturely experience of them. If we do this, however, then in the words of Alexander Broadie, “a question arises as to why we’re justified in using the term [to describe] God.” 2 It seems that if we do not turn God into a being ontologically rooted in creation, then we place Him so far outside of creation that we cannot meaningfully connect Him to the concepts we predicate of Him.

These two extremes are often described using the terms “univocal” and “equivocal.” If a term is univocal, it means that it is the same in name and content. This means that every time a univocal term is predicated of a subject, it is

2. Alexander Broadie, “Duns Scotus and William Ockham,” in The Medieval Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Medieval Period, ed. G.R. Evans (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 250.

predicated of that subject in the same way. 3 For example, if something is “quantifiable,” it is quantifiable in only one way: numerically. Because there is no other way that something can be quantified, there is no other way that something can be “quantifiable.” Therefore, the term is univocal. At the same time, if a term is equivocal, it is the same in name but different in meaning. You can predicate the term of different objects in the same way and the term can mean something entirely different. 4 For example, “pitcher” sometimes means a container designed for pouring liquids. At other times, it refers to a baseball player whose job is to pitch the ball to the batter. Because the word “pitcher” picks out different parts of reality depending on the context in which it is uttered, it is therefore an equivocal term. A term can also be analogical. This means that it is the same in name and similar in content. For example, the color “blue” can be predicated of both the sky and naval uniforms but not in the exact same way. Both may be blue in a similar sense, but their blueness is qualitatively different.

Although this threefold distinction is primarily expressed today as a linguistic one, it derives its credibility and importance from the question of how we can say true things about God. 5 Those supporting the “doctrine of equivocity” claim that when we apply a term to God, we are always doing so equivocally. This means that the term being applied will always mean something entirely different to us than it does to God. Another group supports the “doctrine of univocity,” claiming that, at least when we use terms describing perfections, those terms can be predicated of God in the same way that we would predicate them of human beings. The “doctrine of analogy,” which we will explore later, represents a middle ground between the two positions–an attempt to retain the best of both.

Philosophers such as Moses Maimonides argue that the terms we predicate of God are necessarily equivocal, at least from an epistemological standpoint. 6 This means, in the words of Maimonides, that “their meaning when they are predicated of Him is in no way like their meaning in other applications.” 7 Mai

3. John F. Wippel, “Metaphysics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 90. 4. Ibid. 5. Broadie, 252. 6. Kenneth Seeskin, “Maimonides,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, March 15, 2017, accessed December 25, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maimonides/. 7. David B. Burrell, “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 77.

monides argues that we cannot know the essence of God, and therefore there is a fundamental separation between the meaning of those terms when applied to God and their meaning when applied by human beings. Even though we describe both humans and God using the term “wisdom,” for example, the content of that term is different when applied to each, and therefore the term is equivocal. 8 This doctrine of equivocity is a central plank in “negative theology,” which argues that we can never accurately perceive what God is, only what He is not. 9 According to this view, the Bible, in making statements like “good and upright is the Lord,” 10 is not telling us to equate our creaturely concepts of “goodness” and “uprightness” with God, but instead to apply to Him the connotations of those concepts while withholding the denotations. 11

While the doctrine of equivocity does an excellent job of preventing God from being reduced to His creation, it was believed by many medieval thinkers to lead to agnosticism, if not atheism. 12 If all knowledge we have is creaturely, and nothing creaturely can be meaningfully applied to God, then we cannot have any meaningful knowledge of God. Or rather, even if we can, we have no means of determining whether or not we do. We might have a concept in our minds that we call “God,” but there is no ontological connection (at least as far as we know) between that concept and something that actually exists. Instead, our faith in God is either a faith in something nonexistent or a faith in something epistemically inaccessible. Hence, the doctrine of equivocity appears to scrub God from reality.

Maimonides responds to this claim by arguing that we can still make true statements about God, provided that anything that predicates a characteristic of God must be interpreted as expressing “an attribute of His action and not an attribute of His essence.” 13 God, Maimonides argues, can be spoken of in human terms as long as attributes are only predicated of what He does, not who He is. One can say “God is wise,” provided that the statement is interpreted to mean that the way in which God acts is wise. The problem with this solution, however, is that it still fails to provide us with an actual, existing thing that can be characterized as divine. We can see God’s actions and characterize them as wise and just, but we have no ontologically meaningful concept of God to connect those

8. Broadie, 252. 9. Ibid. 10. Psalm 25:8 (Revised Standard Version). 11. Burrell, “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers,” 76-77. 12. Broadie, 251. 13. Burrell, “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers,” 77.

actions to. To say that “God” did something wise is to say that “something inexplicable” did something wise. Therefore, for Rabbi Moses to say that attributes predicated of God characterize God’s actions but not God Himself leaves us with the same problem as before.

The problem with a rejection of Maimonides’s position is that he explicitly designed it to safeguard God’s divinity from any attempt to reduce God to creation, as he believed was done by the doctrine of univocity. 14 This is important especially in light of the longstanding Islamic debate on divine attributes. 15 The Qur’an often ends long exhortations by reminding readers of a list of terms that are predicated of the Islamic god. 16 Many Islamic thinkers, the al-Ash’ari in particular, endorsed the view that those terms could be predicated of God univocally (even though the way in which they are predicated is mysterious). 17 While this perspective does not imply that God can possibly err, it does imply that God is limited by the same moral and intellectual perfections that limit humans. A perfectly wise human and a perfectly wise God are, in this view, equal to each other in wisdom. As such, either God appears to have been reduced to creation, 18 or creation has been exalted to the level of God. Even worse, because the alAsh’ari claim that the way in which those univocal terms are predicated of God is mysterious, they leave themselves open to the same critique outlined above against Maimonides: that their statements about God are effectively meaningless. One can avoid this latter problem by claiming that we know how univocal terms can be predicated of God, as Parmenides did, 19 but this would only serve to emphasize the primary issue with the doctrine of univocity: that it appears to undermine God’s transcendence.

We will explore whether this critique of the doctrine of univocity is justified later. For now, it is important to recognize that by the time of Maimonides, the problems with both doctrines had become widely recognized. 20 Those problems became more obvious as the debate began to focus on increasingly fundamental characteristics of God, such as His being. When the debate focuses on God’s being instead of His goodness, the debate over equivocity stops being

14. Burrell, “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers,“ 75. 15. Ibid., 76. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. I use the phrase “appears to have been reduced” instead of “is reduced” because whether or not this is the case is a controversy that will be examined toward the end of this paper. 19. Wippell, 89. 20. Ibid., 77.

about whether God is good and starts being about whether God exists. Similarly, the debate over univocity stops being about whether God’s goodness is creaturely and more about whether or not He is more than His creation. As such, the debate over univocity and equivocity had become increasingly incommensurable. Different alternatives had been proposed—such as a doctrine of analogy—but until the time of Aquinas, most of these doctrines were unstable and failed to escape many of the problems with both perspectives.

The doctrine of analogy formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas did not exhibit these same problems. He argued that the characteristics we predicate of God are done so analogically. A simple way to explain this involves a reference back to the analogical use of terms in language. The color “blue” can be predicated of objects in tangibly different ways, but the content of that term, though different, will be rooted in the same overarching abstraction: “blue.” Even if we cannot envision “blue” without its qualified applications, such as “dark blue,” “light blue,” “baby blue,” et cetera, we can intuit that those applications are analogous due to their connection to the ambiguous concept of “blue.” Similarly, our knowledge of the wisdom, justice, and existence of God would be similar to one’s knowledge of the color of the sky if he had only been exposed to navy blue. Such a person would be told that the sky is “blue, but different.” Though the blueness of the sky would remain incomprehensible to that person, they could still be said to have an understanding of “blue.” That understanding would merely be one that is analogous to the understanding that one has of both kinds of blue.

If one lacked knowledge of any shade of blue but navy blue (as we lack knowledge of any kind of being but our own), it does not follow that they are justified in thinking that blue is univocally extended to navy blue. To do so would be to reduce all other possible kinds of blue to one particular shade. However, to claim that one’s understanding of blueness is equivocal would require a similarly problematic claim that navy blue may be just as closely connected to other shades of blue as it is to red or orange. As such, provided that one at least has an abstract understanding that navy blue is not the only kind of blue, it is proper for him to treat blue as something that can be predicated analogically of both navy blue and the light blue of the sky (which is not actually experienced). In other words, the person who has only experienced navy blue can still understand in an abstract way that blueness encompasses more than just navy blue. He can still be said to understand what blue is, though perhaps incompletely. 21

21. Wippell, 90-91.

According to Aquinas, we lack direct knowledge of the essence of God in a way that is similar to how one might lack an understanding of light blue. In understanding a contingent being that is separable from, yet related to, God’s necessary being, we are able to understand particular aspects of the nature of God’s being because we recognize that the very idea of “being” entails something more than our creaturely conception of it. To Aquinas, however, it is not merely that we lack an understanding of how “light” can be applied to a familiar “blue.” Rather, the very nature of “blue” involves an analogical application that can only be fully understood when all of its differing applications are understood. To Aquinas, that is the kind of understanding that God has of “being.” 22

Aquinas parses this out further by describing two ways in which “being” is predicated analogically. The first is a kind of horizontal, modal level of being, grounded in sense experience, where being is separated by categories. Quality, quantity, time, substance, and properties all have being in this horizontal sense, but they have a different kind of being. To Aquinas, the “being” of numbers is tangibly different from the “being” of humans or the “being” of relations. As such, Aquinas believes that “being” is predicated analogically between different categories of being because each involves a substantively different way that a thing can exist. 23 The second way in which a term can be predicated analogically involves a vertical level between contingent being and necessary Being. This means that there is a way in which all of these categories, while being horizontally analogous to each other, are vertically analogous to a different kind of being: a necessary being.

In determining how best to relate analogical predication to each of these two levels, it is important to examine the two ways 24 in which Aquinas thought that terms could be predicated of subjects analogically. 25 The first is the analogy of attribution, or secundum intentionem tantum et non secundum esse, which involves objects that, characterized by the same name, have a “notion signified by this name [which] is the same with respect to the term but different as regards

22. Wippell, 90-91. 23. Ibid., 89-90. 24. There is technically a third: analogy of inequality. This is where something has the same name, denotes the same concept, but is applied to two things that unequally participate in that same concept. However, neither Aquinas nor his successors saw this as a genuine example of analogy, so I leave it unmentioned here. 25. Robert E. Meagher, “Thomas Aquinas and Analogy: A Textual Analysis,” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 34, no. 2 (April 1970): 233, accessed November 25, 2018, doi:https:// doi.org/10.1353/tho.1970.0054.

the relationship to this term.” 26 In other words, the same term is attributed to different objects but done so in different ways. The second is the analogy of proper proportionality, or secundum intentionem et secundum esse, which deals with objects that have the same name, yet have a “notion expressed by this name [that] is similar according to a proportion.” 27 In other words, the same term is attributed to different objects but is done so proportionally.

Aquinas describes three ways in which concepts can be predicated according to the analogy of attribution. 28 First, concepts may be analogous because they are ordered to one end. He gives the example of “health,” which can be said of urine, a potion, and a body. In this list, the first is a sign of health, the second is a cause of health, and the third is a subject of health, and therefore they are all united by the same end of “health” even though the way in which “health” is used is different in each case. Second, concepts may be analogous on the grounds that they are related to the same agent or efficient cause. For example, “medical” may be predicated of a physician, a medical student, and an instrument used in medicine because they are all related to the practice of medicine. Third, concepts may be analogous because they are related to the same subject. All of these things are attributed to the same notion but the relationship between them and the notion is fundamentally different. It is in this way, Aquinas argues, that being is said to be analogous on a horizontal level between accidents because accidents are related to one subject: substance. 29

While all of these subdivisions are useful and important for understanding Aquinas’s theory of analogical predication, none of them are sufficient to predicate terms of God. The “being” of man and the “being” of God are not necessarily related to any particular final cause, and therefore the two cannot be analogous in the same way that “health” is. While man’s and God’s being might be analogous on the grounds that God is the efficient cause of man, that efficient cause is not sufficiently unifying to allow us to predicate terms of God, except

26. Meagher, 233. 27. Ibid., 234. 28. Most contemporary Thomists admit to there being a fourth subdivision of the analogy of attribution: similitude. This was proposed before St. Thomas by St. Severinus Boethius, but was unmentioned in St. Thomas’s works. If accepted, it allows for four analogies of attribution that are each related to one of Aristotle’s four causes. However, because it is not relevant to the current discussion, we will refrain from exploring its meaning. E. Jennifer Ashworth, “Medieval Theories of Analogy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, September 15, 2017, accessed December 24, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analogy-medieval/. 29. Wippell, 90-91.

perhaps “Creator.” Similarly, our being might be analogous to God’s because our being is related to His as a subject. However, this is only meaningful when the relationship between the two is known, as is the case of substance and accidents. The nature of the relationship between us and God, however, is the very question that we are trying to solve. Until this question is answered, the relationship is unknown. Therefore, it is effectively meaningless to say that our being is related to His as a subject. In the words of Aquinas, when speaking of the analogy of attribution, “there must be some definite relation between the things having something in common analogously. Consequently, nothing can be predicated analogously of God and creature according to this type of analogy; for no creature has such a relation to God that it could determine the divine perfection.” 30 As such, Aquinas and his successors see the analogy of attribution as something that cannot properly have metaphysical or religious application. 31

Aquinas writes in his De Veritate that knowledge, being, and the good are instead predicated of God and man by the analogy of proper proportionality. This means that they are predicated of both in the same way that “sight is predicated of bodily sight and the intellect because understanding is in the mind as sight is in the eye.” 32 Therefore, as long as the terms “include no defect nor depend on matter for their act of existence,” 33 “there is no reason why some name cannot be predicated analogously of God and creature in this manner,” for “no definite relation is involved between the things which have something in common analogously.” 34 This lack of definite (definitional) relation distinguishes Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy from others that have been proposed. Aquinas agrees that if such a definite relation existed, as most other theories of analogy assume, 35 then an identical, unifying concept would have to be placed in the definition of each. This means that the analogates (God and man, in this case) might be predicated with reference to the same thing, as quality and quantity are predicated in reference to substance. This appears to require that something be ontologically prior to both God and man, as substance is ontologically prior to quality and quantity, and thus would either devolve the doctrine of analogy into

30. Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q2, art 11. Trans. Robert W. Mulligan, S.J., comp. Joseph Kenny, O.P. (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1952), accessed December 24, 2018, https://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer2.htm. 31. Meagher, 233. 32. Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q2, art 11. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ashworth, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analogy-medieval/.

a doctrine of univocity or make it merely an expression that does not provide a meaningful alternative to the doctrine of univocity. 36

Terms predicated of God analogically, therefore, should only be done without a definite relation. Aquinas expands on this in the Quodlibet, where he observes that

Being is predicated essentially only of God, since the divine esse is subsistent and absolute. Being is predicated of all creatures by participation: no creature is its own existence, but rather is a being which has existence. In the same way, God is essentially good, because he is goodness itself; creatures are called good by participation, because they have goodness… this proposition, “Socrates is,” is an accidental predication when it signifies either a thing’s being or the truth of a proposition. 37

In other words, “being” belongs to a metaphysical hierarchy. The perfections in God’s nature are divine perfections, not creaturely perfections. Those creaturely perfections are analogous to God’s and therefore relate to His perfection, but in a way that is essentially distinct from Him.

Aristotle writes in On Interpretation that “spoken words are the symbols of mental experience.” 38 According to Robert E. Meagher, Aristotle and Aquinas believed in the importance of “[taking] refuge in spoken words,” in “the power of human language to translate the language of the things themselves and thus to symbolize the mind’s experience as a whole.” 39 Meagher raises this in the context of Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy to emphasize that this power of language is the power of analogous signification. “Without analogy,” he writes, “names would be but serial numbers stamped upon the objects of our experience and designating no more than the sequence in which we encountered them.” 40 French philosopher Etienne Gilson emphasizes this in his discussion of Aquinas’s epistemology, wherein “our intellect forms all its concepts by the aid of sense intuition,

36. Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q2, art 11. 37. Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae Quodlibetales, Q2, art 1. Trans. Sandra Edwards, comp. Joseph Kenny, O.P. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1983), accessed December 24, 2018, https://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDquodlib.htm. 38. Meagher, 230. 39. Ibid., 231. 40. Ibid.

wherefore, in its present state, it can have no object unattainable by means of such intuitions.” 41 However, our intellect “longs for the intelligible in the sensible,” and thus, by abstracting from the sensible and applying those sensible concepts to the intelligible, we can know the Good through analogy. 42 Thus, for Aquinas, analogy is the very core of knowledge.

It is important to distinguish this from Aristotle’s thought. According to Aquinas, Aristotle shows by means of their shared epistemology “that there exists a first unmoved mover who we call God.” 43 Aquinas then extrapolates from Aristotle’s argument, pointing out, as paraphrased by Etienne Gilson, that

It is obvious that if God creates things solely because He moves the causes which produce these things by their movement, God must be a Mover as Creator of movement. In other words, if the proof by the first mover suffices to prove creation, then this proof must of necessity imply the idea of creation. Now the idea of creation is wanting in Aristotle, and so the Thomist proof of the existence of God, even if it merely literally reproduces an argumentation of Aristotle’s, has a meaning altogether of its own, a meaning that the Greek philosopher never intended to give it. 44

Because the Greek philosophers never pass beyond the plane of efficient cause, they “[fail] to emerge from the order of becoming.” 45 Rather than things receiving their causality from a higher being, they merely receive a cause that allows them to exercise their already-existing causality. This, for Aristotle, requires that he explain second causes as unmoved movers, for they are “not dependent on any other being in their being.” 46 Aquinas, on the other hand, argues that “the efficient cause produces the being of its effects,” and therefore his ontology requires that the very existence of created things make them contingent upon God. In other words, because Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy involves vertical predication between contingent and necessary being, it demands that existing things point to something that is beyond themselves merely by existing. This is particularly significant for Aquinas’s theology, which philosopher and theologian James K.A. Smith characterizes as being based in a “meta

41. Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, trans. A.H.C. Downes (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940) 258. 42. Ibid., 263. 43. Ibid., 76. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 77. 46. Ibid.

physics of participation in God.” 47 The immediate impact of Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy is that “God’s very essence is existence, whereas the creature ‘is’ only to the extent that it receives the gift of being from the Creator, or, in other words, the extent to which the creature participates in the being of the creator.” In the words of Gilson, the “very existence of beings subject to becoming,” for Aquinas, requires a “radical contingency” on the creator. 48 According to Smith, this contingency means that rather than existing by itself (as an equivocal view seems to imply) or on a concept seemingly prior to and separated from God (as a univocal view seems to imply), creation and thus metaphysics are fundamentally dependent on God. They “cannot be divorced from theological considerations.” 49

Like St. Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus was committed to avoiding the doctrine of equivocity. Though he initially held to that doctrine, he eventually concluded with Aquinas that any attempt to predicate terms of God in an equivocal manner will effectively make all theology useless, for “there would be no certitude about any concept” that is applied to God. 50 He also agreed with Aquinas that no theological claims are univocal and that theology must be done on an analogical basis. 51 Furthermore, he agreed that “terms for intellectual and moral perfections are predicated primarily of God and secondarily and derivatively of creatures.” 52 However, Scotus was dissatisfied with Aquinas’s treatment of the analogy of being, particularly as formulated by Henry of Ghent. 53 He believed that both Aquinas and Henry failed to formulate a doctrine of analogy that can be meaningfully separated from either the doctrine of equivocity or the doctrine of univocity. 54 Scotus argues that in order for theology to work on an analogous basis without devolving into equivocity, it logically requires some

47. James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 97. 48. Gilson, 68. 49. Smith, 97. 50. Richard Cross, Duns Scotus, Great Medieval Thinkers (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 36. 51. Ibid., 35. 52. Broadie, 253. 53. David B. Burrell, “John Duns Scotus: The Univocity of Analogous Terms,” The Monist 49, no. 4 (October 1965): 640, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27901617. 54. Cross, 37.

element of univocity. 55

He begins his argument with an innovative definition of a univocal concept. First, he claims that a concept is univocal when it “possesses sufficient unity in itself, so that to affirm and deny it of one and the same thing would be a contradiction.” 56 Second, he argues that it needs “sufficient unity to serve as the middle term of a syllogism, so that wherever two extremes are united by a middle term that is one in this way, we may conclude to the union of the two extremes among themselves.” 57 In other words, the concept named by the term needs to be sufficiently identified with its name in order to be clearly applied and sufficiently unified as a concept in order to adequately relate other concepts together. For example, the concept defined by the word “beagle” is unified by what is common to all beagles and is identified by a name that lacks any other common application. 58 As such, “beagle” might be used as the middle term of a syllogism:

[1] All beagles have long, floppy ears. [2] Simon is a beagle. [3] Simon has long, floppy ears.

If the concept “beagle” was equivocal or analogical, we might say that this syllogism is possibly a non sequitur because it does not specify the way in which Simon is a beagle. Because the concept is univocal, however, the term can be meaningfully applied as the middle term without confusion.

Scotus then analyzes the doctrine of analogy. He first argues that analogy between two concepts requires some similarity and dissimilarity between the two, saying that “things are never related as the measured to the measure, or as the excess to the excedent unless they have something in common.” 59 Scotus believes that without this “something in common,” we cannot meaningfully conceive of how the two concepts can be analogously related to each other, and therefore the concept is equivocal, not analogical. This “something common” ensures, in his words, that “in every comparison something determinable is com

55. Broadie, 253. 56. John Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings, trans. Allan Wolter, O.F.M. (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964), 23. 57. Ibid. 58. “Beagle,” Merriam-Webster, accessed December 25, 2018, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beagle. 59. Broadie, 253.

mon to each of the things compared.” 60 Analogy, therefore, requires commonality. To illustrate this, he uses the example of the analogy between humans and donkeys, writing that “if a human being is more perfect than a donkey, he is not more perfect qua human than a donkey is; he is more perfect qua animal.” 61 Broadie explains that for Scotus, “In the phrase “human animal,” “animal” is the determinable and “human” the determinant which qualifies “animal.” Likewise in “asinine animal,” “animal” is the determinable and “asinine” the determinant.” 62 Thus, Scotus separates all analogous terms into a determinable and a determinant, whereby the latter qualifies the former and thus creates the kind of similarity and dissimilarity that Scotus believes is needed for analogy to be meaningful. In this way, he rejects Aquinas’s analogy of proper proportionality, which exists without a definite relation–without that “something common” demanded by Scotus.

This has implications for how we predicate terms analogically of God. Scotus agrees with Aquinas that theology must be done on an analogical level, but he only does so in light of the above. This means that in predicating creaturely characteristics of God, there will always be a determinable concept shared by both God and man, and a set of determinants that qualify the univocal, determinable characteristic. That determinable is shared by both but can be considered apart from each in a univocal sense. This means that, in the case of wisdom, there is a “wisdom” shared by both God and man that is also apart from God and man. “Wisdom” is akin to “blue” insofar as it is shared by both “light blue” and “dark blue” but is ultimately prior to and apart from both. This does not mean, per se, that determinable “wisdom” is ontologically prior to God’s wisdom. Scotus did not believe that at all. Instead, he believed that the determinable element of an analogical concept is the “ultimate quid” of that concept. It is something conceptually prior to both divine and human wisdom that contains the commonalities of both. This concept is therefore something about God that we can know perfectly as humans because it is something that both we and God possess fully and completely. 63

According to Scotus, this simpliciter or quiddity is known directly, “but only by an intellectual act of abstraction, by which, starting from the concept of the determinate, we form a concept of what remains if we think away the determinant.” 64 In other words, the determinable is what Alan Philip Darley

60. Broadie, 253. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Burrell, “John Duns Scotus: The Univocity of Analogous Terms,” 644. 64. Broadie, 255.

calls a “vicious abstraction which is subsequently applied analogically.” 65 In applying concepts to God analogically, Scotus believes that we need to form the creaturely concept in our head and then think away all of the creaturely aspects. Whatever remains is what applies univocally to God. Scotus, therefore, believes that we can predicate terms analogically of God provided that we acknowledge that there is always a univocal element to that predication which connects both God and man.

In this way, Scotus believes that the doctrine of the analogy of being as formulated by St. Thomas and Henry of Ghent ultimately devolves into a doctrine of univocity. This means that the concept of being, when used analogously, necessarily entails a conceptually prior “being simpliciter” that is always predicated univocally. In the words of Etienne Gilson,

What the doctrine really means is that the quiddity, the very essence of the act of existing, taken apart from the modalities which determine the different modes of existence, is apprehended by the intellect as identical…When Duns Scotus says that what first falls under the intellect is being, he no longer therefore understands with St. Thomas the nature of sensible being as such, but existence in itself, without any determination whatsoever, and taken in its pure intelligibility. To say, under these conditions, that being is univocal as regards both God and creatures, is simply to affirm that the content of the concept applied to them is the same in both cases, not because they are beings of the same order, or even of comparable orders, but because being is not regarded as signifying only the very act of existing, or the very existence of this act, independently of every other determination. 66

In other words, “finite being” and “infinite being” may be of entirely different orders and therefore analogical, but only because the “is” of something can ultimately be traced back to what it means to “be” in a very fundamental and univocal sense. This univocal sense of being is called “being simpliciter” by Scotus. 67 Another way to phrase this is that being simpliciter is the univocal common ground between our being and God’s, for if being was characterized by anything outside of that common ground, then either God lacks being or we do. Scotus believed that being simpliciter is “not known directly or by an intuition, but only

65. Alan Philip Darley, “Does Aquinas’ Notion of Analogy Violate the Law of Non-Contradiction?” The Heythrop Journal 54, no. 2 (November 24, 2010): 232, accessed November 25, 2018, doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2265.2010.00626.x. 66. Gilson, 264. 67. Broadie, 254.

by an intellectual act of abstraction” 68 because he believed that only through such abstractions can we hope to understand concepts apart from our creaturely experience of them.

This is important for Scotus’s epistemology, which is rooted in Augustinian Platonism. For Scotus, the “intellectual act of abstraction” produces a concept that is closer to God and therefore closer to the Truth than the sensible things we perceive (which are only indirectly connected to God through the quiddity that connects the two). For Scotus, therefore, the sensible world is not something that is naturally perceived by the intellect (as Aquinas argues) but is instead something that happens “simply on account of the state in which [humanity] in fact finds itself” after the fall of man from the garden. 69 Only through “purely intelligible” abstractions can we in our creaturely, sensible state rise closer to the knowledge of God. 70 In connecting God and creaturely, sensible reality, these intelligible concepts are at least ontologically prior to the way we perceive the world. Because of this, Scotus believes that “by birthright, [the human intellect’s] proper object can only be a pure intelligible… and what it immediately attains is neither the essence of the singular sensible thing as such, nor yet the essence of this singular rendered universal by a logical operation, but the intelligible essence itself.” 71

Scotus believed that his analysis of the doctrine of analogy was needed to prevent analogy from devolving into a doctrine of equivocity. If this devolution occurred, then the critiques outlined above against Maimonides would apply to all theistic theology. 72 Furthermore, Scotus argues that for us to make arguments such as Aquinas’s “Argument from Motion,” the term “cause” needs to have the same sense when applied to God and creatures. 73 Otherwise, it would be impossible to reason from the causes of movement in the world to an overall first mover: God. In the words of Scotus, “That from the proper notion of anything found in creatures nothing at all can be inferred about God, for the notion of what is in each is wholly different. We should have no more reason to conclude that God is formally wise from the notion of wisdom derived from creatures than we would have reason to conclude that God is formally a stone.” 74

68. Broadie, 255. 69. Gilson, 263. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 264. 72. Cross, 36. 73. Broadie, 255. 74. Ibid., 256.

It is important to emphasize that Scotus did not believe that his doctrine reduced God in any way. Instead, he believed that we should still be able to meaningfully say that God is still infinite, uncreated, and therefore existing in a different mode of being. Scotus is particularly emphatic in affirming God’s infinity as His primary characteristic. For Scotus, until the existence of an infinite being has been established, it is not God whose existence has been proved. Aquinas agrees. 75 Both of these philosophers spend an extensive amount of time describing the nature and implications of God’s infinity. The primary difference is the way in which they go about doing it. Like Aquinas, Scotus speaks of God through analogies. Unlike Aquinas, however, he insists that those analogies contain a definite relation to the essence of God and therefore include an element that exists inside of both yet is apart from both. In speaking of being qua being, to Scotus, we are always speaking of this definite relation, the being simpliciter. Aquinas, by rejecting such a definite relation, is able to say that being qua being involves the essence of God, something that our existence only participates in. 76 In other words, Aquinas believes that the true Being is God Himself, while Scotus believes that the true Being is being simpliciter. 77

Although Scotus himself wanted to avoid reducing God to the creaturely, many philosophers say that that is exactly what his doctrine of univocity does. Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith argues that under Scotus’s theory, “Being… becomes a category that is unhooked from participation in God and is a more neutral or abstract qualifier that is applied to God and creatures in the same way.” 78 Smith quotes Philip Blond, who further argues that “Duns Scotus, when considering the universal science of metaphysics, elevated being to a higher station over God, so that being could be distributed to both God and His creatures.” 79 Their argument is that when there are concepts that apply univocally to both God and man, even “vicious abstractions” such as Scotus’s being simpliciter, the “vertical suspension of creation from the Creator is unhooked, and because being is ‘flattened,’ the world is freed to be an autonomous realm.” 80

75. Gilson, 56. 76. Ibid., 51. 77. Ibid. 78. Smith, 97. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid.

Furthermore, God’s aseity (His existence a se, or independent of contingency) is threatened because “being” now is a necessary precondition to God’s existence.

This seems to be a fair critique. Recall that Scotus’s problem with the doctrine of analogy is simply that analogy is too ambiguous to be anything but equivocal if it does not have a univocal element. This ambiguity is rooted in the idea that you need a “something common” to connect two concepts to make them analogous. This “something common” is Scotus’s being simpliciter, which is applied to both God and man, and can be considered apart from both. As a concept, being simpliciter is truly conceived even without any divine or creaturely properties attached to it. That is, being simpliciter can be considered apart from His essence. Furthermore, because nothing can be said to exist without being simpliciter, it seems as if all existing things are ontologically dependent on being simpliciter for their existence–even God. David Burrell argues that “this proves unwelcome for theological reasons,” for “this style of thinking leads to a notion of a being indistinguishable from the most common genus.” 81 Burrell argues that “creator cannot share a genus with creature and still remain God.” 82 Scotists might respond by drawing a Kantian distinction between conceptual (phenomenological) priority and ontological (noumenal) priority, but there is no indication that this is a distinction that either Aquinas or Scotus would have accepted.

Some philosophers trying to reconcile Scotist univocity with Christian orthodoxy, such as Norman Geisler, concede that Scotist univocity effectively places God and man under the same genus but say that this is not necessarily bad. For example, man and dog share the genus “animal” equally but are not equal animals. 83 Just because God and man are equally predicated by a determinable does not mean that they themselves are equal. The determinants “God” and “man,” by their differing essences, involve greater or lesser versions of that same determinable. This helps mitigate the claim that Scotus’s doctrine of univocity undermines God’s transcendence, but not with the claim that it undermines God’s aseity. One could reject God’s aseity and therefore the Anselmian view of God as a maximally perfect being, but doing so would involve rejecting a key tenet of (at least) Christian orthodoxy. 84 Something more important than God’s aseity would need to be at stake for theism for theologians and theistic philosophers to accept Scotus’s argument.

81. Burrell, “John Duns Scotus: The Univocity of Analogous Terms,” 643. 82. Ibid. 83. Darley, 232. 84. William F. Vallicella, “Divine Simplicity,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, January 02, 2015, accessed December 24, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-simplicity/.

Perhaps something more important is at stake. If Scotus is right that (1) the doctrine of equivocity undermines all theological discourse, that (2) Aquinas’s doctrine logically devolves into a doctrine of equivocity, and that (3) Scotist univocity is the best alternative to Aquinas’s doctrine, then perhaps Scotism is necessary for the science of theology to be preserved. Because theology needs to first be meaningful for us to even say that God is a se, maybe Scotus’s doctrine of univocity is preferable to Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy even if it undermines God’s aseity.

An opponent of Scotus’s argument may respond in three ways. First, one might reject (1) and argue with Maimonides against Aquinas, Scotus, and the scholastics. This approach was discussed in the second part of this paper. Second, one might reject (3) and argue that Scotus is correct in his critique but wrong in his alternative. This approach, taken by philosophers such as William of Ockham, is an important approach to examine, but one outside of the scope of this paper. Third, one might reject (2) and argue that Aquinas has a way to wiggle out of Scotus’s critique. We will examine this approach in what follows.

The validity of Scotus’s critique centers around a single question: is he correct in rejecting the analogy of proper proportionality? Such an analogy, which Aquinas uses to predicate terms analogically of God, does not involve a “something common” between terms and would, under Scotus’s view, be no different than predicating terms of Him equivocally. If Scotus is wrong that there is no meaningful difference between equivocity and the analogy of proper proportionality, then Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy still allows us to meaningfully predicate being of God and remains a viable alternative to equivocity and univocity.

Unfortunately, Scotus’s critique came years after Aquinas’s death, 85 and thus we lack a direct response from Aquinas. However, it is not too difficult to construct a potential defense of the analogy of proper proportionality in light of Aquinas’s writings on the subject. The most helpful of these involve examples that he gives to describe the meaningfulness of the analogy. These examples are important because they give us tangible ways in which an analogical predication might be different from an equivocal predication, even in the absence of a definite relation. The example mentioned earlier was that of sight. Aquinas says that “sight is predicated of bodily sight and the intellect because understanding is in the mind as sight is in the eye.” 86 This kind of analogical reasoning seems to be

85. Scotus, xv. 86. Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae Quodlibetales, Q2, art 1.

both common and meaningful in daily life. If we were to insert “blood vessels are in the brain” in the place of “understanding is in the mind,” it would seem clear that we are no longer comparing concepts that are analogous in the same way. Both “understanding is in the mind” and “blood vessels are in the brain” are phrases that lack a meaningful definite relation to the sight of the eye, but the former still seems to be a far more fitting analog to “sight is in the eye.” It would seem, then, that there is more to analogy than a “something common” between two concepts.

Of course, defenders of Scotus might argue that the only reason Aquinas’s example is meaningfully analogous is because we already have a basic understanding of the two concepts being compared. We know that the sight of the mind and the sight of the eyes are analogous to each other because we already apprehend some unifying concept that binds the two. We do not have the same kind of understanding of the essence of God. That is, an analogy is only meaningful if we first understand the way in which the being of man is related to the being of God—through a being simpliciter. Indeed, it is true that we can only understand what an analogy of proper proportionality is and the full extent of its meaning through the use of an example. However, that is not the same as requiring that all analogies of proper proportionality require some knowledge of both terms in order to be meaningful.

In fact, it is easy to see how an analogy of proper proportionality might be meaningful even with complete ignorance of one of the two concepts. This happens frequently when certain practices or experiences that are unique to a particular culture or time period are also unique to their language, such that the same experiences cannot be fully communicated to someone who comes from a different culture and speaks a different language. Whenever someone who has experienced this unique cultural characteristic tries to put it in the terms of a different language, they have to borrow terms that are analogous to the concept they are trying to explain. The person receiving the explanation can only think of the concept in terms that they understand. That explanation, given in different terms and using words that do not contain the same concepts, will necessarily be analogous in a way that does not seem to involve a definite relation.

An excellent example of this can be found in a dialogue that takes place in World on Fire, the fifth episode of the first season of Daredevil. One of the characters, Claire Temple, is trying to understand how the main character, Matthew Murdock, can perceive as much as he does even though he is blind. She asks, “What does a hairline fracture sound like?” He describes it as “an old ship.” He explains that he draws from all of his other senses, such that “all the fragments form a sort of impressionistic painting.” Confused, she asks, “But what does

that look like? What do you actually see?” He responds, “[I see] a world on fire.” 87 After the conversation, both the viewer and (presumably) Claire have a much better understanding of how this blind man who walks with a cane can fight off “the bad guys” with so much speed and accuracy. This understanding is not gained through any meaningful definite relation between the concepts “old ship” and “hairline fracture,” but instead through analogies and metaphors. In telling Claire that the picture of a “world on fire” to one’s eyes is analogous to that “impressionistic painting” he puts together with his accumulated senses, Matthew is communicating concepts to Claire that are too similar in context to be considered equivocal.

It is true that without the “something common” demanded by Scotus, the extent to which an analogy of proper proportionality is meaningful will never be fully understood. It will be vague–a blur. However, in the same way that one without any understanding of what it is like to see while blind can have a better (though vague) understanding once metaphors and analogies are used, one with that understanding can still understand with greater clarity. Once a concept is expounded upon further, it can be better understood.

This is illustrated in Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous book, After Virtue, where he complains of a shallow modern understanding of the much older, Greek conception of “virtue.” This shallow understanding, he argues, is often imposed by modern philosophers onto Greek texts, producing a distorted understanding of their actual meaning. 88 To adequately explain the ancient concept of “virtue,” however, MacIntyre does not resort to a brief definition or a short, pithy explanation of its meaning. Instead, he spends eighty-three pages describing the etymologies, histories, and nuances of the different Greek words translated as “virtue.” In describing the story of how an entire society’s moral language evolved, he can, though imperfectly, give us some conception of the cultural context in which Aristotle operated when he formulated his conception of the virtues. Armed with that understanding, the modern reader is able to substitute a shallow, modern account of the virtues with an account similar to the one inherited by Aristotle. Though MacIntyre’s description of Aristotelian virtue is inevitably imperfect because it is being communicated to readers who remain removed from Aristotle’s cultural context, MacIntyre’s account allows him to meaningfully describe concepts that are alien to our current culture and intel

87. Luke Kalteux, writer, “World on Fire,” in Daredevil, dir. Farren Blackburn, Netflix, April 10, 2015. 88. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 119.

lectual tradition. But it takes eighty-three pages. 89

MacIntyre is using analogy when he puts the experiences of other cultures in terms of our language and culture. This act of translation involves drawing abstract concepts that the English language never had use for, has forgotten, or has changed, and putting them in terms we can understand. Perhaps this is why it is so important for MacIntyre to emphasize at the very beginning of this eighty-three page discussion that “the chief means of moral education” in classical cultures “is the telling of stories.” 90 Matthew Murdock uses metaphors to communicate what he “sees” without eyes. MacIntyre uses stories to communicate what the Greeks saw without the Enlightenment. The differing amount of effort that they put into their explanations is indicative of the differing amounts of clarity they achieve. Murdock gives us a vague picture. MacIntyre, in his words, “captures much, but very far from all, of what the Aristotelian tradition taught about the virtues.” 91

Scotus might say that the latter example ultimately devolves into a kind of univocity. Once each conception of “virtue” is fully developed, there will be commonalities and differences between the two, allowing a Scotist to divide the analogy into an equivocal set of determinants and a univocal determinable. While this argument can be made, it does not refute my point. Aquinas’s example already shows us that an analogy of proper proportionality can be meaningful even without a definite relation. Murdock and MacIntyre show us that there are ways to explain meaningful analogies without an appeal to a definite relation. The analogy of proper proportionality can be explained in a similar way.

While this brief discussion of a centuries-old debate is insufficient to settle the issue, it appears that contemporary defenders of St. Thomas’s doctrine have relatively good grounds to argue that the doctrine of analogy is meaningful. If this is the case, Scotus’s critique of that doctrine fails. Rather, the beliefs of both Scotus and Aquinas need to be compared on their merits. Because Scotus’s doctrine undermines the aseity and transcendence of God in a way that Aquinas’s doctrine does not, it appears that orthodox Christians and theists have reason to prefer the latter.

89. MacIntyre, 121-204. 90. Ibid., 121. 91. Ibid., 203.

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